One of the narratives invented by gun control activists and their political allies to try to make their agenda more palatable to the general public has been to recast gun crime as a “public health crisis.” Under this approach, burgeoning gun ownership, legal or otherwise, becomes an epidemic, and the cure for this “contagion” is, obviously, all manner of bans and restrictions on legitimate firearm possession and use.
Recasting firearm related crime as a disease also takes the emphasis off lax enforcement of existing law (see for example, this week’s accompanying alert from Northern Virginia), which certainly isn’t a polite topic of conversation in firearm prohibition circles.
The strategy is far from new. As far back as the early 1990s, for instance, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and its National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) were promoting the use of a “public health model to work toward changing society’s attitude toward guns so that it becomes socially unacceptable for private citizens to have handguns.” The NCIPC’s Director in 1994 opined that guns, like cigarettes, needed to be portrayed as “dirty, deadly, and banned.”
By 2024, President Biden-appointed U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy supercharged the public health bureaucracy’s war on guns with a first of its kind advisory titled, Firearm Violence: A Public Health Crisis in America, which was debunked by the NRA almost immediately. The CDC had already scrubbed from its own website page on firearm injuries and deaths data on defensive gun use (DGU) that cited an estimated 60,000 to 2.5 million DGUs each year.
As revealed by the California Rifle and Pistol Association in 2022, the CDC made the changes not as the “result of any new research or extended deliberations between the various sides of the defensive gun use debate” (or even consultations with the affected researchers), but because of a furtive and “one-sided lobbying campaign by gun control advocates who were angry that the DGU figures reported were hurting gun control efforts… Introductions from the White House and Senator Dick Durbin’s (D., Ill.) office helped the advocates reach top officials at the agency after their initial attempt to reach out went unanswered.” A subsequent letter from five U.S. senators, calling out the CDC’s censorship of valid research and its dereliction of duty, included the ugly detail that “Mark Bryant of Gun Violence Archive lobbied against the study references on the CDC website. He stated ‘[T]hat 2.5 Million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again.’”
Under President Donald Trump and his Executive Order on “Protecting Second Amendment Rights” (directing a review of any actions of executive departments and agencies that “purport to promote safety but may have impinged on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens”), not only has the Murthy advisory been removed from the federal Department of Health and Human Services website. but the CDC has restored the section on DGUs, specifically citing “a range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year.” The actual source document (2013) states “[d]efensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed … Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million.”
A much more recent source, the 2026 National Firearms Survey, includes a section on DGUs and calculates that approximately 2.2 million defensive uses of firearms occur annually, including many incidents that are unlikely to be tallied by law enforcement or other formal reporting sources.
In that survey, almost 40 percent of gun owners (33.1 million adult Americans) reported using a gun to defend themselves, another person, or their property (the survey specifically excluded DGUs during military service, police work, or work as a security guard). A majority of gun owners who’ve used a firearm defensively (55.3%) have done so on more than one occasion. In the vast majority of cases, the gun was not fired, and in 70.6% of incidents, “the defense was successful, such that no crime remained to be reported to the police,” meaning that the incident would never be counted in law enforcement statistics. Another kind of DGU unlikely to appear in police statistics or crime victim surveys is defensive use against animal attacks or threats: the survey reports that 8.4% of defensive incidents involved animals. The survey describes these animal-defense incidents as “a real and neglected phenomenon.”
Indeed, protection is far and away the most common reason gun owners give for why they own a gun. A glance through the NRA’s reports, the Crime Prevention Research Center’s log of DGUs, or other news sources (here and here) shows that DGUs overall are very real and documented events.
Gun control advocates responded to the restoration of the DGU data with dismay. The Trace, a website supported by anti-Second Amendment billionaire Michael Bloomberg, quoted the obliviously ironic statement of Devin Hughes of GVPedia, identified as one of the lobbyists responsible for having the DGU data “killed and buried” in 2022. “It is the politically motivated laundering of disinformation that has become a hallmark of the Trump administration’s approach to all scientific inquiry, and gun violence is no exception.”
Rigorous denial of reality is, of course, central to the firearm prohibition cause. This is why, for example, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” was written out of the Bill of Rights in their rhetoric for some 70 years. Next to that, what is hiding hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives saved every year by DGUs? It’s all the same tired and increasingly transparent playbook.
Apart from their own common sense and lived experience of gun ownership, citizens today are less likely to be swayed by partisan political advocacy masquerading as legitimate public health research. It hasn’t been all that long since the particularly awful months lost to lockdowns and public health approved urban riots, the CDC’s “confused performance during the COVID-19 pandemic,” and the agency’s resulting drop in public confidence. The CDC now recognizes that “[d]windling public trust has undermined CDC’s ability to lead effectively during crises and has weakened public adherence to health recommendations,” and its credibility depends on the agency “restoring a gold standard for science to ensure that federally funded research is transparent, rigorous, and impactful, and that all decisions are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available.”
Efforts to hide the facts on DGUs have been unsuccessful. As the NRA pointed out early last year, though, there’s still much work to be done to cure the systemic bias against the right to keep and bear arms within the federal bureaucracy.
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